Negri, Cesare

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Cesare Negri

c. 1535–c. 1604

Dance master
Dance theorist

Milan.

Cesare Negri's The Graces of Love (1602) was the most complete and detailed of all the great Renaissance works on dance theory and practice, and it provides a great deal of information about the dance life of the Italian upper classes in the late Renaissance. In this work Negri also informs us about his own life, allowing us to reconstruct the career of one of the Renaissance's most important dance masters. Born in Milan around 1535, he served the city's Spanish governors as dance master until 1599. Between 1555 and 1600 he also directed a number of spectacles for major Italian ducal families. His list of distinguished clients included the Visconti, the Medici, the Gonzaga, and D'Este. One of his most impressive productions was a spectacle celebrating the naval victory of the Italian admiral Andrea Doria against the Turks in 1560. Another was his direction of the festivities marking the visit of Queen Margarethe of Spain to Milan in 1598. In his capacity as dance master, Negri also traveled extensively with Milan's noble rulers, performing dances for them on journeys to Malta, Genoa, Naples, Florence, Mantua, and Saragossa. Negri's Graces of Love is also a rich source of information about the major dancing masters of the later Renaissance. He includes the names of over forty dance masters who practiced at the time and gives details about their training and where they traveled to practice their art. His work thus points to the development in Italy of a group of professional male dancers, many of whom opened dancing schools in Europe's cities or who taught dance to their noble patrons.

Dances.

Negri's dance manual includes some of the typical information on ballroom etiquette that is to be found in many similar books from the period. He also discusses dance's role in aristocratic processions and intermedi, two of the most common occasions for theatrical dance in Renaissance Italy. By far, though, the largest portion of The Graces of Love is given over to a technical discussion of dance steps. The dances that he treats in the work are extremely complex, among the most difficult to survive from the Renaissance. In particular, he treats extensively the upper-class forms of the galliard and outlines a number of variations on the dance's footwork. He also shows that dances, just like the music of the time, were often improvised and that dancers loved to practice variations on the basic steps, joining different steps and footwork together to create ever more difficult choreographies. He includes 43 choreographies for dances, a number of which are figure dances similar to those that are still performed in American square dances. Like other dance manuals of the period, Negri's also included music to accompany these forms.